Most people probably don’t realize Alex Borstein is the same actress who broke out on MADtv, has been voicing Lois Griffin on Family Guy for 25 years, and won two Emmys for her role as Susie Myerson on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And yet, while she may still not be a household name, she has slowly but surely put together a more accomplished and steady career than she ever could have imagined.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, the comedian talks about returning to her stand-up roots for her latest one-woman show, “Alex Borstein Is Thirsty,” and looks back on the twists and turns of her unlikely Hollywood journey. That includes her misgivings about how her iconic character Ms. Swan went from a loving impression of her grandmother to an unfortunate racist caricature and how she landed the lucrative Family Guy gig over some much bigger names. Borstein also gets into her beloved HBO cult classic series Getting On and why she decided to deliver an anti-fascist call to arms when she accepted her second Emmy Award for Maisel. And finally, a deeply embarrassing story about the time she appeared opposite Halle Berry in Catwoman.
“They always say, ‘write what you know,’” Borstein, 54, says of her new one-woman show. That’s why “Thirsty” mostly focuses on raising kids and taking care of aging parents while “I’m sandwiched right in the f—ing middle,” as she puts it. “The center of an Oreo is delicious, but this is not as sweet, it’s rough,” she admits.
The show is a long-awaited return of sorts to stand-up comedy, which Borstein first attempted at 16 years old at a small club “in the lobby of a Ramada Inn” before pivoting to sketch comedy at the Groundlings in L.A. and then as a key member of the MADtv cast for five seasons staring in 1997. That was a very different time in comedy, as evidenced by her most famous character, Ms. Swan, a vaguely Asian older woman whose catchphrase—“He look-a like a man”—was denounced as racist at the time and has only aged more poorly.
“Ms. Swan was based on my grandmother,” Borstein, who is of Jewish Hungarian descent, explains, but the character, which she had performed live with a curly gray wig “morphed” once the MADtv producers gave her chopped black hair and set the sketch at a nail salon.
“Her ethnicity became super mushy and different,” Borstein says, regretfully, without letting herself off the hook. “It all kind of happened together in the room, and we laughed so hard and we loved it. And of course, now it’s such a different climate.”
Borstein adds that she wouldn’t make the same decisions today. “But the thing that I look back, why it really wasn’t fair or cool is because we had no other representation on that show,” she says. “We had no Asian writers. Bobby Lee joined later. But really, the things we were doing on that show, we just had no concept of any of that. We were just pushing the envelope, trying to be really funny. And it was an absolute blast at the time. But now you look back and go, that’s not entirely comfortable.”
Of course, Borstein continued to “push the envelope” as the voice of Lois Griffin on Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy, which somehow became the defining role of her career. The show just celebrated its 25th anniversary this past year and is still going strong on Fox.
“I do think it has changed,” Borstein says of how the show has evolved over that time. “I think there’s a tiny bit more care in how we punch and the direction we punch.” When the show premiered in 1999, MacFarlane was a “complete outsider” to Hollywood, she adds. Now that the creator has become friends with many of the people who could be targets of the show’s jokes, it has “certainly” complicated that calculus.
Unlike South Park, which is having a particularly big cultural moment right now because of the way it is engaging with the Trump administration, Borstein explains that Family Guy has never had the “luxury” of being able to comment directly on current events. That’s because while Matt Stone and Trey Parker produce each episode of South Park the week it airs, Family Guy episodes can take more than a year to create.
And while South Park has gotten more partisan of late, Family Guy takes pains not to pick sides. “We punch everybody,” Borstein says. “We make fun of the right-wing, we make fun of the left-wing. You’re appealing to every side because you’re punching in all directions. And it’s more comfortable that way for me too. I’ve always been able to take a good punch and take a great verbal hit. I have very thick skin, I guess from, from a life in comedy. When you’ve been writing or working in comedy for so long, you don’t know when you’re burning your own skin sometimes.”
That said, there have been times when certain Family Guy storylines went too far for Borstein—less because of how outright offensive they were and more because they just couldn’t land the joke. “My gauge is, did I laugh?” she says. “Even if it was uncomfortable and harsh, did I think it was funny? And if I don’t think it’s funny, when it’s time to give notes, I’ll say, I just don’t think this works. It’s not that I’m offended, it’s that I don’t think the funny outweighs the offense.”
Borstein clarifies that she’s “never refused to record anything” as Lois, “but I would say eight times out of 10, by the time it airs, some of those ones that I was most uncomfortable with may have changed anyway, because they weren’t getting the laugh.”
And now, 26 years into her run with the show, she is still able to find new things to love about her character. “There is an episode coming up that will air this next season that I think is my new favorite episode,” she teases. “It’s called ‘Edible Arrangement’ and it’s kind of a two-hander with Seth and I. It’s Stewie and Lois, which we haven’t seen a lot of, and it’s so cool, it’s so different, and it was so much fun to do.”
Borstein probably could have been perfectly content hiding behind the animated visage of Lois Griffin for her entire career. But then she got the opportunity to step back into the spotlight in a big way as Susie, the manager-sidekick to Rachel Brosnahan’s title character on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—a role that ended up winning her two consecutive Emmys.
From the beginning, creator Amy Sherman Palladino kept telling her, “I’m gonna get you an Emmy, you’ll see.” But at that point, Borstein felt like she’d “kind of given up on show business” so didn’t quite believe it. By the time she won her second Emmy for the show in 2019, she was confident enough about her place in the industry to use her acceptance speech to issue a rallying cry for all of the women in the audience and watching at home.
When she got on stage that night, she told the story of her Jewish grandmother, who was in line to be shot by Nazis in Budapest during World War II but dared to step out of the line and ended up escaping to America. “And for that I am here and my children are here,” Borstein said, holding her statue in the air to applause from the star-studded crowd. “So step out of line, ladies! Step out of line!”
“I’m so glad she’s not alive to see what has happened,” Borstein says now of the way America has creeped closer to the fascism her grandmother escaped. “‘Never again’ has been the mantra post-Holocaust. And here we are. Humans are so tribal, and we are just forced to repeat these patterns.”
“But I also think a lot of people will yell and scream, ‘You’re not stepping out of line the way that I think you should be stepping out of line.’ And that’s dangerous,” she continues. “The way that my grandmother survived is she ripped off her star, and she went up to that guard and she said, ‘What happens if I step out of line?’ He said, ‘I don’t have the heart to shoot you, but somebody will.’ And she stepped out of line, and then she lied, said she was working with the Red Cross, she hid, and then she quietly survived.”
“There are so many different ways to survive,” Borstein continues, “and there are so many different ways to step out of line.”
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